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Cocoa Bread
1 cake compressed yeast 2 cups milk, scalded and cooled 1 tablespoon sugar 5½ cups sifted flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup sugar 1/2 cup cocoa 1/4 cup butter 2 eggs Dissolve the yeast and one tablespoon of sugar in lukewarm milk; add three cups of flour and beat until smooth. Cover and set aside to rise in warm place until light-about one and one half hours; then add butter and sugar creamed, eggs well beaten, cocoa, remainder of flour, or enough to make soft dough, and salt. Knead lightly; place in greased bowl; cover and set aside in warm place, free from draft, until double in bulk-about two hours. Mold into loaves; place in well-greased bread pans, filling them half full. Cover and let rise again until light-about one hour. Bake forty to forty-five minutes.
The recipe makes two loaves. Nuts or fruit may be added if desired. The bread may be used for making delicious sandwiches. Buns may be made from the same dough and decorated with chocolate frosting.
BOSTON BROWN BREAD No. 1 2 cups rye meal 1 cup corn meal 1 teaspoon salt 1/3 cup molasses 1 teaspoon soda 2 cups sour milk Dissolve the soda in the milk. Mix and sift the dry ingredients; add the sour milk and molasses; pour into a buttered mold and steam three hours. Brown in the oven twenty minutes. BOSTON BROWN BREAD No. 2 1 cup corn meal 2 cups graham flour 1 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup sugar 1/2 cup molasses 1½ teaspoons soda 2 cups milk Mix and cook the same as Brown Bread No. 1. 1 cup butter .
Three related breads run together on one loose leaf: a sweet cocoa yeast loaf and two steamed Boston brown breads. The original gives no oven temperature and no pan size, so both need supplying.
- Oven temperatureBake the cocoa loaves at 350F for the 40 to 45 minutes given. The brown bread's finishing browning is 350F for twenty minutes, done after the steaming, with the mold uncovered.
- Compressed yeastOne cake of compressed yeast was about 0.6 oz of fresh cake yeast. Substitute one packet (2 1/4 teaspoons) of active dry or instant yeast; with instant you can skip the dissolving step and mix it straight into the first three cups of flour.
- Milk scalded and cooledScalding raw milk inactivated whey proteins and enzymes thought to slacken dough, and killed off bacteria besides. Pasteurized milk needs only warming to lukewarm, roughly 95 to 110F.
- Flour quantityFive and a half cups is a ceiling, not a target. The instruction "or enough to make soft dough" is the one to follow; modern flour is thirstier than some 1920s soft wheat, but cocoa and butter both slacken the dough, so add the last cup by feel.
- CocoaNatural unsweetened cocoa is what this recipe assumes. Dutch-process works and gives a darker crumb; there is no chemical leavener here for it to interfere with.
- Loaf pansTwo standard 8 1/2 x 4 1/2 inch pans, filled half full as directed. The dough is enriched and rises slowly at the last stage, so give it the full hour.
- Sour milk in the brown breadUse cultured buttermilk. Modern refrigerated milk goes bad rather than pleasantly sour, so do not try to sour it by leaving it out; a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice stirred into two cups of milk is the usual stand-in.
- Rye meal and graham flourRye meal is coarsely ground whole rye, closer to a light rye meal than to modern fine rye flour. Graham flour is coarse whole wheat. Either substitution works, though a fine flour gives a denser loaf.
- Steaming the brown breadA one-pound coffee can, a pudding mold or two 15 oz cans work; grease well, fill two-thirds, cover with foil tied down, and stand on a rack in a covered pot with boiling water halfway up. Top up the water during the three hours.
- The stray lineThe '1 cup butter' at the end is an orphaned fragment, apparently carried over from adjacent text. It has no place in either bread.
The cocoa loaf is a 1910s-20s American enthusiasm, chocolate having become cheap enough after the spread of large-scale cocoa pressing to turn up in bread dough and buns, while Boston brown bread is much older, a New England steamed loaf built on rye and cornmeal because those grew where wheat did not, sweetened with molasses from the West Indies trade and raised with soda and sour milk rather than yeast. Steaming rather than baking is generally traced to the same practical logic as the pudding cloth: a covered mold in a pot needed no oven, and the very wet, coarse dough would never have risen into a proper baked loaf anyway.